If you opened or received some artwork of mine as a commission or part of trade, might have noticed a kind of pattern in the filename, which I’ve explained explain in this article and probably, will save you some time when doing yours if you’re an digital artist as well.

Take a look at this example:

2019-11-28-comm-daniel-harrier
└1───────┘ └2─┘ └─ 3 ──── 4 ─┘

It consists in:

1. 2019-11-28
   Creation date. It is important to keep file’s consistency because will never change, and every new work will always be put on the top or bottom of a digital stack.

2. comm
   Work’s category. The example is a commission, so it’s just called comm. Some others are:

REQU: Request
TRADE: Art trades
TEI: Art of my OCs done by myself.
ART: General arts / fanarts.

Believe or not, took days ‘till defining an acronym for general arts. These things came in mind before:

• fan
• dart
• fana
• fart (ºnº ) … Standing for FanART. How genial.

1. daniel and harrier
   After the creation date and work category, I put some keywords for summarizing the work, and they respect this order:
   Username > Franchise > Character(s) name(s) > Scenario

Usually there are between 2 and 4 words, no more else or will be much long.

Some examples

• 2022-11-18-art-badguys-diane-mrwolf
  - Franchise
  - Characters’ names

• 2022-12-22-art-donbluth-mrsbrisby-littles
  - Franchise or their creator
  - Main characters’ name (since it has other four)
  - A keyword.

• 2023-05-15-comm-roji-betty-dupris
  - Username
  - Main character’s name and surname.
  Can just keep the first name as well.

• 2022-11-02-art-splatoon-shiver-nadando
  - Franchise
  - Character
  - What they’re doing (“Nadando” is “swimming” in portuguese)

Benefits

Sorting

Every file related to some art (project, image, text note) appears together as long as the folder is sorted by name. This is also a bit pleasing visually:

▲ Name	Description	Size	Date
2022-12-22-art-donbluth-mrsbrisby-littles-en.jpg	JPG file	—.MB	0000-00-00
2022-12-22-art-donbluth-mrsbrisby-littles.mdp	FireAlpaca document	—.MB	0000-00-00
2022-12-22-art-donbluth-mrsbrisby-littles-roug.jpg	JPG file	—.MB	0000-00-00
2022-12-30-art-fidget-noogy-puppet.jpg	JPG file	—.MB	0000-00-00
2022-12-30-art-fidget-noogy-puppet.mdp	FireAlpaca document	—.MB	0000-00-00
2022-12-30-art-fidget-noogy-puppet-sktc-2.jpg	JPG file	—.MB	0000-00-00
2022-12-30-art-fidget-noogy-puppet-sktc.jpg	JPG file	—.MB	0000-00-00
2023-01-03-art-monsterrancher-fairyhare.jpg	JPG file	—.MB	0000-00-00
2023-01-03-art-monsterrancher-fairyhare.mdp	FireAlpaca document	—.MB	0000-00-00
2023-01-03-art-monsterrancher-fairyhare-sktc.jpg	JPG file	—.MB	0000-00-00

Search

Looking for artworks of a specific character or for some customer never been so easy to me thanks to this pattern.

Typing -judy on my search bar leads me to these files:

▲ Name	Description	Size	Date
2018-08-15-art-zootopia-judyhopps-sktc.jpg	JPG file	—.MB	0000-00-00
2018-08-16-art-zootopia-judyhopps-sketches.jpg	JPG file	—.MB	0000-00-00
2023-03-20-comm-roji-judybot-preg.mdp	FireAlpaca document	—.MB	0000-00-00
2023-03-20-comm-roji-judybot-preg-roug.jpg	JPG file	—.MB	0000-00-00
2023-03-16-comm-roji-judybot-preg.mdp	FireAlpaca document	—.MB	0000-00-00
2023-03-20-comm-roji-judybot-preg.jpg	JPG file	—.MB	0000-00-00
2023-03-16-comm-roji-judybot-preg.jpg	JPG file	—.MB	0000-00-00

• Comissions of Robo judy for Roji Tanner in 2023
• Generic traditional sketches done in 2018

A name pattern means:

• No more mess and annoyance trying to find some work or cleaning up disk space removing redundancies.
• Less time for sorting and renaming your works, and then, more time for doing them.

Want to try by yourself?
Feel free to do so, even tell me if worked for you. Any doubts, it’s just contact me! (>w0)b

~ Tei.